Towards 130th in Manhattan, 1926

Grauerholz steered the van through the slow, quiet rain in the deserted hours of the morning, his stiff, capable body gripping the wheel, an act between pushing and strangling, the tires rolling over the ground perfectly, perfectly and the crates & dresses & assorted paraphernalia buzzing and rattling with the gravity of the moving vehicle. 

He was neither new to driving nor was there any reason practical or imaginary to observe the laws for the police and he neatly slowed at each red-light or intersection, and he often put the van deadstill, hitting the right-blinker for right and the left-blinker for left. 

He liked being the one who drove. He'd never say as much to Levanarskie or the other one for fear they'd either pettily interfere with the desire or else ridicule his deliberate want for anything. 

The crates, of course, were fully-stuffed with Lee-Enfield rifles. The National Guard was really the only association permitted to import the weapons into the country from England. England, of course, had no personal relationship with American Workers at that point, however: there is, at least in my mind, some implied association in the nature of Great Britain's desire to invade & appropriate the countries of the world by force and coercion and where America has followed in those footsteps is all but tattooed in the sky and the ground and the water and whatever should drift, sit or fall inbetween. 

Among every moment of charity or greed is the possibility to do the opposite. 

So. 

He pulled the van up to the gate before the cargo-docks where the harsh brick/concrete structure stood perhaps some 300 feet after and he put it in Park and left the engine running and unbuckled his seatbelt before unlocking the door and opening it, slipping off the seat and onto the floor outside. 

Once the gate had been opened, he'd driven the truck through, got out, closed the gate, locked it, and then got back into the vehicle to drive it to its proper place outside the department store. He turned off the engine and so forth and let himself into the building. 

Augustine Grauerholz was not what modern people would consider an utterly incorrigible sort of person. He hadn't had any sort of criminal-record prior to his relationship with Peter Nicholas Levanarskie and the third, anonymous man who fired shots on February 20th, 1926. His most serious offenses would be: illegal possession of alcohol and public intoxication, nothing more. 

He walked through the store with quiet serenity. He was like some misunderstood, misunderstanding monk, a victim of his own opportunism in a confused...suppressed...opportunistic society. 

And there is great, perhaps immeasurable mystery in what his life would have been had he never known Levanarskie, and arguably just as much of it had he not been murdered in prison. Evidently, the darkness of the future and the natural fates that reside beneath it are little more than the total that would keep them in the mathematical stone of their shifting singularity. 

In less than seven weeks, Sisyphus would receive the bullet that would send him back to Limbo for the umpteenth time and not long after, Peter Nicholas Levanarskie and Augustine Grauerholz would be clapped out of their souls completely. 

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